Whether or not Iím being automatically ignored here, hooray, Iím genuinely glad that actual audio technology is being discussed in a way that might well be constructive, and I have a reference to cite in the future as an illustration of why that works and posting whilst irate does not.

I've examined the -q 0.75 MP4 with a spectrograph and it only has a couple holes in the very top 20khz shelf in the noise pouches between the spikes of the percussion, so even if you could hear 20khz it wouldn't have a loud enough intensity to be audible and even if you could still hear it, you're missing a few pouches of noise.

I guess we should start encoding with Blade @128kbits for archival quality.

The question is, how does Opus or any codec only have an advantage at one bitrate? It should be higher quality in all cases.

Remember, Opus is a very-low-delay format. HE-AAC or xHE-AAC (USAC) are not. So why are you surprised that Opus sounds worse on this very tonal sample? It shouldn't be surprising that for music, low-delay formats lose efficiency/quality much quicker at low bitrates than higher-delay formats. By the way, have you compared Opus and (HE-)AAC at 96 or 128 kbps?

QUOTE

Really....?

QUOTE ( @ Jan 27 2013, 02:50)

I guess we should start encoding with Blade @128kbits for archival quality.

Come on, guys, that -q 0.75 (292 kbps average) certainly serves well enough to get an idea of the original recording. Do we have to be that picky? The test encodings are less than 32kbps stereo!

Remember, Opus is a very-low-delay format. HE-AAC or xHE-AAC (USAC) are not. So why are you surprised that Opus sounds worse on this very tonal sample? It shouldn't be surprising that for music, low-delay formats lose efficiency/quality much quicker at low bitrates than higher-delay formats. By the way, have you compared Opus and (HE-)AAC at 96 or 128 kbps?

By default Opus uses 20 millisecond frames. I wonder if increasing it to 40 ms helps for tonal samples like this, or if this is just one of those samples where SBR is too well suited.

While I'm happy the OP has shown enough respect to supply some DBT results (even though they don't support the claims), this makes me wonder whether this discussion will ever go anywhere. Maybe my leaving it will help.

@serenI don't use 32 kb/s for music, but I'm hoping it will happen someday. The original format of the song I uploaded is .MOD and it's only 15KB which gives it a bitrate of 1.2 kb/s and even lower when compressed.

@saratogaI've explained myself numerous times, I won't do it a third. Also, choosing MP3 for quality isn't a wise choice given its inefficient block sizes and other numerous design flaws make it incapable of transparency at any bitrate.

@db1989You're just being ignored, for now anyway. I intended to respond but posts concerning the original topic came back up so I went with the flow.

@greynolI never said anything about archival quality.

@C.R.HelmrichI increased Opus' delay to the maximum 60ms to produce that sample. Is this close to AAC's? I'm aware it was intended for VoiP but your latest listening test got my attention when I heard AAC has finally been made obsolete, so I was puzzled why this was only true for one bitrate? No I haven't ABX'd higher bitrates but since I do not intend to switch to Opus even if it is only slightly higher quality, I'm not wasting the time. USAC is due which will crush both AAC and Opus.

I don't think two counts as "numerous", particularly when one of them is you accusing me of trolling. Basically, you've just said that you rated Opus higher even though you don't think you should have. Is that a fair summary?

QUOTE (Warning @ Jan 26 2013, 20:26)

Also, choosing MP3 for quality isn't a wise choice given its inefficient block sizes and other numerous design flaws make it incapable of transparency at any bitrate.

No, MP3 is quite transparent at high bitrates. You need to do some listening tests, I suspect you'll be surprised. Or alternatively, take a look at some of the historical listening tests on this site.

QUOTE (Warning @ Jan 26 2013, 20:26)

I increased Opus' delay to the maximum 60ms to produce that sample.

Hmm, did you use any other non-standard settings? Where is that FLAC file you mentioned, I'm curious to try it myself.

QUOTE (Warning @ Jan 26 2013, 20:26)

I'm aware it was intended for VoiP but your latest listening test got my attention when I heard AAC has finally been made obsolete, so I was puzzled why this was only true for one bitrate?

Did you see my explanation above? You shouldn't assume that one codec will be better at all bitrates. AAC-He is a great example of a codec that does really good at low bitrates and not good at higher bitrates.

I don't think two counts as "numerous", particularly when one of them is you accusing me of trolling. Basically, you've just said that you rated Opus higher even though you don't think you should have. Is that a fair summary?

No, opus had better stereo dynamics at the expense of sample quality. AAC had better sample quality with the expense of simplified stereo. They both sounded like shit in the end and which one's worse is a matter of opinion. Do you prefer better brightness or better stereo?

QUOTE

No, MP3 is quite transparent at high bitrates. You need to do some listening tests, I suspect you'll be surprised. Or alternatively, take a look at some of the historical listening tests on this site.

Already have. Trained ears can distinguish the MP3 artifacts at even 320 kb/s due to serious design flaws, even if ours can't. Both will sound transparent at 192 kb/s to both of us and AAC will have better technical quality, retaining more inaudible, high-frequency parts so what's the point of using an outdated format if you're aiming for quality, pal?

QUOTE

Hmm, did you use any other non-standard settings? Where is that FLAC file you mentioned, I'm curious to try it myself.

Nope. I'll upload a FLAC later if anyone else requests.

QUOTE

Did you see my explanation above? You shouldn't assume that one codec will be better at all bitrates. AAC-He is a great example of a codec that does really good at low bitrates and not good at higher bitrates.

Except it does just fine and outperforms MP3 at any bitrate. For real dude, you aren't too bright for someone that's been here for a decade. I've learned everything I needed about AAC within a month when I decided to switch to it. This site's listening tests also prompted my move when it kept being rated #1 even if y'all now downsize its bitrate, fraudulently advertise it as higher and declare it to be lower quality than f*cking QUICKTIME.

I don't think two counts as "numerous", particularly when one of them is you accusing me of trolling. Basically, you've just said that you rated Opus higher even though you don't think you should have. Is that a fair summary?

No, opus had better stereo dynamics at the expense of sample quality. AAC had better sample quality with the expense of simplified stereo. They both sounded like shit in the end and which one's worse is a matter of opinion. Do you prefer better brightness or better stereo?

That is not what you said before:

QUOTE (Warning @ Jan 26 2013, 21:03)

So I compared at different bitrates and opus always sounded worse.

And then you rated Opus as having higher quality. So you've basically said that Opus is better, that both are equally bad, and that AAC is better.

Like I said before:

QUOTE

think you need to figure out what it is you believe before posting such strong statements that may or may not be correct.

And I still mean it.

QUOTE (Warning @ Jan 26 2013, 21:03)

Already have. Trained ears can distinguish the MP3 artifacts at even 320 kb/s due to serious design flaws, even if ours can't.

Source? This sounds like nonsense to me.

QUOTE (Warning @ Jan 26 2013, 21:03)

Both will sound transparent at 192 kb/s to both of us and AAC will have better technical quality, retaining more inaudible, high-frequency parts so what's the point of using an outdated format if you're aiming for quality, pal?

What is "technical quality"? How does one assess it?

QUOTE (Warning @ Jan 26 2013, 21:03)

Nope. I'll upload a FLAC later if anyone else requests.

Requested. Upload it now so I can try.

QUOTE (Warning @ Jan 26 2013, 21:03)

Except it does just fine and outperforms MP3 at any bitrate.

This I doubt. AAC-He is not really intended to be transparent. Its basically just estimating higher frequencies via harmonic extension and some side information. But by all means, if you have evidence, I'll look at it now.

QUOTE (Warning @ Jan 26 2013, 21:03)

For real dude, you aren't too bright for someone that's been here for a decade. I've learned everything I needed about AAC within a month when I decided to switch to it.

I'm not attacking you, so no need to get so worked up over nothing.

QUOTE (Warning @ Jan 26 2013, 21:03)

This site's listening tests also prompted my move when it kept being rated #1 even if y'all now downsize its bitrate, fraudulently advertise it as higher and declare it to be lower quality than f*cking QUICKTIME.

Not sure if you're aware of this and just mistyping, but Quicktime is an AAC encoder, and in fact it it wildly considered to be among the best AAC encoders.

And then you rated Opus as having higher quality. So you've basically said that Opus is better, that both are equally bad, and that AAC is better.

I said I COMPARED at different bitrates, not ABX'd. That sample was the only one I ABX'd because I couldn't tell immediately by listening if Opus had an advantage. Stereo defined that particular song more than brightness. I already explained this before.

QUOTE

Like I said before:

QUOTE

think you need to figure out what it is you believe before posting such strong statements that may or may not be correct.

And I still mean it.

I don't wanna believe. I'm not interested in being right, I'm interested in being correct. A concept OGG-pimping cock-smokers especially fail to grasp or any other codec fanboys for that matter.

QUOTE

Source? This sounds like nonsense to me.

I'll let you know when I find it. I recall some people on here boasting of such abilities too.

This I doubt. AAC-He is not really intended to be transparent. Its basically just estimating higher frequencies via harmonic extension and some side information. But by all means, if you have evidence, I'll look at it now.

You're confusing an extension with an encoder. MP3 can use SBR too, it's called mp3pro. It still sucks and sounds worse than AAC.

QUOTE

I'm not attacking you, so no need to get so worked up over nothing.

You said CBR and VBR MP3 at the same filesize is the same quality. Something only a colossal mouth-breather would say after being exposed to audio tech resources for a decade, or a troll playing dumb like you.

QUOTE

Not sure if you're aware of this and just mistyping, but Quicktime is an AAC encoder, and in fact it it wildly considered to be among the best AAC encoders.

So why was it surpassed every single time by Nero in the past and now when you guys decide to use a considerably lower bitrate for Nero like here it ends up last. Well if that just wasn't predictable... Biased testing to the core.

I was tempted to reply to this thread yesterday but I opted to wait and calm down. It is obvious that the thread hasn't really advanced.

Warning is clearly biased and has been confirming it in each of his posts.

- First biasing shown: Opus, being free, open source, and being endorsed by the same team than Vorbis means it's a second grade codec.- Second biasing shown: AAC, being an MPEG codec, is a first grade codec.- Addenum to second biasing: AAC is an evolution of MP3 to improve it, HE-AAC is an evolution of AAC to improve it, USAC will be an evolution of AAC improve it.- Third biasing shown: A better codec has a higher frequency response spectogram (we are at Hydrogenaudio, so we won't accept that as a proof no matter the insistence in doing so).- Addenum to third biasing: high frequency response is synonym to quality (This is the reason why judging HE-AAC and Opus at 32kbps, the OP says Opus is rough, worse, sounds like garbage... Even when the only sample he tested and provided an ABX, he valuated the stereo separation of Opus making it outperform HE-AAC)- Possible fourth biasing: Golden ears exists, and I believe them. (As shown by the sentence Trained ears can distinguish the MP3 artifacts at even 320 kb/s due to serious design flaws, even if ours can't.)

All that, without counting the several times he has taken the opportunity to show disparagement, and other bad behaviours, like in post #8.

It didnít take long for the nose-thumbing tantrum to resume. Iíll let someone else decide, but unless Warning stops being so exaggeratedly incivil, I suggest shutting the whole thing down.

Anyway, do you think your little rants are impressing anyone here? I really doubt it. At worst, you might be able to link similarly biased trolls here and have a good chuckle with them, but as long as they donít start posting like you, I couldnít care less.

Actually, having read the latest addition to the Recycle Bin since I wrote the above, I donít see the point of continuing to provide a platform for this hateful attention-seeker. At worst, he gets to cry INTERNET FASCISM to other people who have his same ridiculous approach to forums. So what? A couple more angry and biased trolls in the world. Boo hoo. By this point, youíre a drop in the ocean. Your contributions here are doing nothing but prove why we need rules like those we already have.

But Iím going to leave this open for now to see whether anyone else wants to have a punt. I wouldnít want to oppress their free speech, after all!

I increased Opus' delay to the maximum 60ms to produce that sample. Is this close to AAC's?

QUOTE

This I doubt. AAC-He is not really intended to be transparent.

OK, some clarification is necessary here.

HE-AAC has a frame length of 2048 samples in the normal dual-rate mode, and with its 50% window overlap, one frame spans 4096 input samples = 93 ms @ 44.1 kHz. Opus has very little frame overlap, which makes efficiency go down on tonal signals. So even 60-ms windows in Opus wouldn't be enough to get to the efficiency Level of HE-AAC. And IIRC Opus doesn't have 60-ms windows. I think the developers once mentioned here that the CELT block size can never be more than 20 ms, so a 60-ms frame just contains 3 blocks. Yes, if the block size were 40 ms, it would probably sound better.

HE-AAC is in fact intended to be transparent. In downsampled SBR mode, you can move your SBR start frequency up to 16 kHz or more, i.e. into (nearly) inaudible regions. But nobody uses it that way because then it gives no advantage over AAC-LC.

If you define technical quality as e.g. "maintaining efficiency on different input signal characteristics", I'm perfectly OK with this. The rest is mostly a sign of encoder tuning and has nothing to do with the particular formats.

Some last words to Warning: please stop the cursing! What's the point of calling people trolls etc.

And please upload a FLAC of 30 seconds of that MIDI-like item. And upload it in the Upload forum.

However, if Vorbis allocate only 32kbps for easy samples people typically don't test, words like "abuse" or "cheat" would come up to my mind. This hypothetical hyper-VBR allocates more bits to the hard samples people typically test, and "abusing" easy samples exists in calibration albums but people don't test.

Ideally, average bitrates of test samples should be close to calibration albums by including enough easy samples, but preference for harder samples is unavoidable sometimes.

Including easy samples in the test should be desirable since the codec should be equally challenged in making a level of transparency with less bits; really testing how effective the VBR is.

So why was it surpassed every single time by Nero in the past and now when you guys decide to use a considerably lower bitrate for Nero like here it ends up last. Well if that just wasn't predictable... Biased testing to the core.

What?!

Nero 95-96 kbpsApple TVBR 93-94 kbps.

And still Apple AAC encoder was much better than Nero. It was actually day and night difference.

Instead of posting harsh and uneducated comments You could read rules of this forum.You're confusing us with some "audiophool" community.

QUOTE (Warning @ Jan 26 2013, 22:26)

USAC is due which will crush both AAC and Opus.

How naive, how naive.

MPEG Surround was here since 2007. And there is still no available codec in 2013.It was supposed that it would be superior to HE-AAC/HE-AACv2 at <32 kbps (music) in that moment. Now,2013, who is interested in <32 kbps (music)?

So while waiting for a USAC real encoder take a deep breath and count until billion (and a little bit too)USAC has +8 kbps advantage over AAC, and beleive it or not, it means that USAC and Opus will have a same quality for 64 kbps and higher. What about <64 kbps? It's not 2003 when people were interested in 32 kbps audio. It's 2013 and 64 kbps is considered comfortably low. Poll. Even YouTube uses 96 kbps audio for default quality video streams, and =>128 kbps audio for HD.

Instead of spitting googled information about USAC, here some people already have some real stuff and know what will be happening in a few next years.

I'm aware the tests are VBR, they STILL have to match the target bitrate as much as possible for the test to be scientific. All the bitrates in my test are VBR but they also are adjusted to be as close to 32, 48 or 64 kb/s as possible, I'm not gonna allow opus to go all the way up to 80 if the target is 64. Not too hard to comprehend. The truth is in the middle. Stop going to extremes and thinking CBR is your only other option. Do VBR and adjust the quality setting to match the bitrate. Stop thinking in black and white.

It sounds like what you want is ABR ("average bit rate", every file as close as possible to nominal) rather than VBR (close to nominal rate averaged over a wide variety of material). WIth ABR, relative ranking of codecs could change if you test an album coded as one file vs individual tracks.

For my money, vbr would give the best overall bang for the bit on my player, and also (afaik) encode faster since the encoder doesn't have to analyze the whole song before it gets down to business (or in your case, encode, adjust, repeat until you get precisely 64k).

To summarize, smarter VBR is an advantage in real performance. If you cripple that, the test is less valid.

If you define technical quality as e.g. "maintaining efficiency on different input signal characteristics", I'm perfectly OK with this. The rest is mostly a sign of encoder tuning and has nothing to do with the particular formats.

You better go back and re-read. My Blade comment was (and still is) fair game.

This really boils down to nothing more than passing-off lossy as lossless because the spectral plot is nicely filled-in:

QUOTE (Warning @ Jan 26 2013, 16:26)

I've examined the -q 0.75 MP4 with a spectrograph and it only has a couple holes in the very top 20khz shelf in the noise pouches between the spikes of the percussion, so even if you could hear 20khz it wouldn't have a loud enough intensity to be audible and even if you could still hear it, you're missing a few pouches of noise.

I'm posting to announce I've done ABX listening tests to... confirm what I already knew and hence all your trolling has been successful.

On a tough-timbred song I tested different MP3 bitrates at mono to not deal with the stereo-spacing bullshit like with opus vs. Nero, up to 192 kb/s. On 128 kb/s I got 37/50, 28/40 for 160 and 37/60 for 192, and I do not even have golden ears.

Since this is a mono file, 192 is more or less equivalent to 384 for a stereo song, well above the 320 kb/s max limit. MP3 blows, it was never meant to be transparent. Deal with it and move on.

Nero AAC on the other hand was transparent at 80 kb/s.

I took the liberty of also testing QTAAC to see if you guys really aren't full of shit with your biased listening tests. Its horrible flexibility made it an unmanageable bitch to do a fair comparison. On the same mono file it failed to keep the 44.1 samplerate on the lower bitrate I selected and failed to produce CBR at CBR mode and ended up with 44 kb/s when 40 was selected. Nero had none of these issues.So naturally QT at 32 khz with the samebitrate vs Nero at 44 khz, it beat Nero.

Encoding with Nero at samplerates below 44 is not an option either as Nero for some reason sucks capital ass with these samplerates. To avoid a very frequent misinterpretation with you illiterate fucks: Nero produces much lower quality at lower samplerates with the SAME bitrate. Yes, tell the devs to fix that shit. MP3 even can compete with AAC if it uses a 32khz samplerate at 128 kb/s and majority of post-pubescent people can't hear above 32khz anyway.

Anyway, testing with a real, stereo song at 64 kb/s with Nero and QT, QT was audibly worse than Nero. Yeah, Apple's audio gear sucks as much dick as their H.264 implementation that ended up being worse quality than MPEG-fucking-2. Embarassing company.

About Blade MP3, I downloaded it to test greynol's bullshit assertion. Surprise, surprise. Not only does it NOT retain higher frequencies than AAC, the degradation of the formants was so obvious on the spectrograph that I could predict immediately the horrible flanging that would result if I hit the play button... and out the defects came. As obvious on the ears as it was on the eyes.

To actually think that I expected any kind of intelligence from this troll site is laughable, I must be insane.

But as I'm an honorable guy, I will hand over ABX results and spectrogrpah screenshots (Blade) upon request and that's the last I'll have of your nazistic dump.

Or you can silence this post too, as we all know your needle-dicked members of authority hate being contradicted.

Btw, did another opus vs. AAC test with that 'tonal' sample as you call it. opus didn't disappoint me:

P.S. I hope the terrible attitude made abundantly clear in your post, like that of a foul-mouthed child who didn’t get enough lollipops, speaks for itself without me having to point out what a pitiable person you are. Oh – oops.

Actually, you know what? I’m moving this back out of the Recycle Bin to let people discuss the claims made in your post if they want to and can be bothered to navigate around all the stupid insults you littered it with. I won’t, however, change my mind about banning your pathetic ass (both cheeks, er, I mean accounts) for this laughable [this was wrong: it’s really not funny] tantrum of yours. You can cry censorship all night long if you want. We’re happy to censor people who conduct themselves as you have.

I mostly _expect_ that for music (speech is another matter) at very low rates where everything sounds like crud that Opus will be a little more cruddy than HE-AAC as just one of the inevitable consequences of our decision to have latency suitable for interactive useó an order of magnitude lower than HE-AAC. Certainly for some samples it will be the case. But low latency means wider adoption (by people who want the low latency) and lower decoder memory usage that will benefit people who don't care about latency. I hope and expect future Opus encoders to do somewhat better at those low rates (in part by taking advantage of additional lookahead when the delay is acceptable)... and that it might be helpful if people collected examples where Opus was unusually bad so we'd have them for testing when we got around to paying attention to low-rate music. (Rearranging the deck chairs on the inadequate rate titanic hasn't been the greatest priority)... and in any case, people targeting low rate music who don't care about Opus' other qualities (latency, speed of the OSS encoder, licensing, scalability, speech performance)... might prefer to use other codecs. And that's okay. Choice is good.

But no, the results postedó as noted by Saratogaó actually give Opus a higher score at each rate tested, including the lowest one.

We live in a mad mad world.

(Edit: I actually missed the second page of this thread until now. Weee... Well using large frame sizes in Opus will not help: They will only save you on the order of a few hundred bit/s except in the LPC modeó and people aren't talking about rates low enough where the LPC mode would be used on music)